Submitted information:
Chairwoman Lisa Cupid’s office will host a series of meetings to educate residents about Cobb County’s strategic plan for the future. The first of the “All In” Cobb Policy Discussions, Effective and Efficient Government, will take place 6:30 – 8:30 p.m. Thursday, May 1, in the Board of Commissioners’ meeting room, 100 Cherokee Street, Marietta. The county finance director and various county leaders will delve into how Cobb government operates and the resources it requires to run smoothly.
An additional meeting notice includes the following:
“Cobb’s strategic plan identifies effective and efficient government as a strategic outcome area. Our finance director and various county leaders will delve into how our county operates and the resources it takes to make Cobb the best it can be. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn and engage with fellow community members. We value the input of all here in our County and your participation helps us ensure that our practices are consistent with our most important stakeholders: our residents.”
The 2023-28 strategic plan (you can read through it here) is an outline of priorities, strategies, and themes to guide the county over a five-year period.
The draft includes seven topic, or “strategic outcome” areas—community development, economic development, governance, housing, infrastructure, mobility and transportation and public safety.
That draft, released last year, includes a recommendation to develop a process to “evaluate and adapt land use policies that promote exclusionary zoning and inhibit a variety of housing options across the County.”
Exclusionary zoning is the practice of allowing only certain kinds of zoning categories in certain areas, and has come up frequently in communities across the country—especially suburban ones—in regard to affordable housing in recent years.
When we posted this notice last year, we added that the-then Biden Administration issued comments about exclusionary zoning claiming that such practices “drive up housing prices, poorer families are kept out of wealthier, high-opportunity neighborhoods. This, in turn, leads to worse outcomes for children, including lower standardized test scores, and greater social inequalities over time.”
Cupid has mentioned affordable housing frequently, including at a contentious town hall meeting in 2022 in East Cobb when she said that “people who work here should be able to afford to live here.”
There’s no such language suggesting or proposing a ban in the Cobb strategic plan draft, which goes onto to recommend that other strategies to address affordable housing include setting a countywide housing mix goal, and to ensure that a proposed Unified Development Code, should that be approved, “enable a variety of housing types.”
The proposed UDC also has become something of a hot-button topic but is very slowly making its way through the drafting process (a draft issued in November can be found here).
In February, the county’s consultant for the UDC made a presentation suggesting a new planned development category for major mixed-use projects, and public meetings are scheduled this spring on the first two installments of the draft.
No specific meetings have been announced.
To RSVP for Thursday’s strategic plan meeting click here.
Related:
- Cobb school board, commission announce FY ’26 budget process
- Cobb delays Columns Drive median tree-cutting after protests
- Cobb department heads ask for $92M+ in new spending
- Server outage affecting some Cobb online systems
- Cobb libraries enable wireless printing from mobile devices
- 2025 Cobb tax digest projected to grow by 2 percent
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